The public switch telephone network that evolved in the 1980s incorporated the Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN). The Advanced Intelligent Network uses the Signaling System 7 (SS7) network for signal or system control message transport between components of the advanced intelligent network. A typical architecture of the Advanced Intelligent Network includes a variety of central offices, including service switching points for processing voice and data transmissions to and from a variety of customer premises equipment, such as telephones and computers. In order to provide advanced telecommunications services, a variety of other components are included in the Advanced Intelligent Network, including service control points. Among other things, service control points maintain databases of subscriber data and instructions for routing voice and data transmissions and for directing subscriber data to other network components for providing advanced telecommunications features to subscribers.
The modern Advanced Intelligent Network also includes intelligent peripheral components including service nodes. Service nodes are used by telecommunications service providers for providing a variety of specialized features including text-to-speech conversion and a variety of specialized services, for example, Call Monitoring and Call Return With Calling Name. Service nodes are also commonly used for obtaining input from subscribers by providing a caller with interactive voice prompts and recorded announcements.
Service nodes typically are connected to the Advanced Intelligent Network via integrated services digital network (ISDN) lines through which data is transported to and from service nodes. Service nodes are typically connected to an Advanced Intelligent Network via a servicing switching center or central office. When a call is received at a switch requiring some specialized feature or processing from a service node, a trigger is typically fired at the switching center or central office launching a query to a service control point. At the service control point, all data required for providing the specialized service is routed to a switch associated with a service node tasked with providing the specialized feature or service.
The data from the service control point is routed to the service node switch via the SS7 signaling system via an AIN protocol. At the service node switch, the switch maps the AIN message data from the service control point to an ISDN protocol message for routing the data to the service node. Because the AIN message and the ISDN message do not precisely map to each other on a data field by data field basis, the AIN message often has data needed by the service node, but for which no matching data field is available in the ISDN protocol message. For example, the AIN message may contain multiple telephone directory numbers required by the service node for providing a specialized calling handling feature. If the ISDN protocol message does not have data fields for populating with the multiple telephone directory numbers, those numbers may be dropped by the switch and are not sent to the service node in the ISDN protocol message. Thus, the service node is required to query the service control point again for data that was dropped or ignored by the switch in order for the service node to provide the specialized service or feature. That is, for each item of data required by the service node, but not received by the service node, the service node must query the service control point as many times as is necessary until the service node receives all data required for providing the specialized service or feature.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.